You’ve worked hard to make sure you’re competitive by paying your people a good wage for the work you need them to do and for your industry. Perhaps to the point that you pay a higher flat rate so you also don’t have the stress of constantly calculating overtime and all those confusing allowances? So it’s a bit of surprise one day to find that you’re still liable for back pay on overtime and allowances when a disgruntled employee asks …

If you said having to address an employee’s bad body odour then you’re certainly not alone! The first time I heard this example from someone, I was struck by the terror they felt at getting it wrong. They hadn’t started the day to cross socially acceptable boundaries like this let alone with an employee with protections from a poorly handled insult to their dignity! Given I recently heard this as yet another example of the worst conversation to have with an …

Or how engaging your team in workplace change can help your business thrive – and could save you time and money If you work in any organisation, then you’ll be familiar with workplace change: identifying and targeting new customers rolling out new procedures introducing new equipment employing new people … the list goes on! But often implementing change at work feels hard! Change may not happen at all, or the changes work for a while, then everyone goes back to …

I recall going to my very first company Christmas party in my younger days and watching in fascination as the normally quiet office receptionist (having had a few too many cocktails) complained loudly about the lack of a bonus that year. In hindsight, that was the easiest part of the night to deal with as her later heckling of the ‘boss’ (and then the ‘big boss’) during their ‘thanks-for-the-year-that-was’ speech made everyone so uncomfortable that the party basically ended by …

A thought from the desk of Clare Mullen During my last Gestalt* training weekend, I was reminded of something that I first learned when I was introduced to the idea of complex adaptive systems and our role in them. We are all changed by the interactions we have with others Each interaction you have today will change the world. As captured in the Sliding Doors films, every decision you make sets off a potentially different chain of events. We can’t …

I’ve tended to stray from regularly talking about RAW HR and after some questions recently, I thought it would be helpful to put out some further information on what makes the RAW HR team tick and why we do what we do. First, let me set a scene…imagine if you had an extra day each week to work on your business, (or to spend however you choose)? Example 1 – you need to take on another staff member, but don’t …

You’ve had a great 2018 and the Christmas decorations seem to have been in the shops…well… just a tad early this year. Like organising whose house the family Christmas lunch will be at, you know this means it’s time for you to start planning the Christmas / New Year shut down for your business. Or perhaps you need to plan working through for your clients (e.g. like many in the hospitality industry for example)? Either way, this crazy time of …

Picture this… one of your casual employees has asked to see you tomorrow morning to discuss wanting to go permanent. They really caught your attention when they mentioned something about you ‘have to let them because they heard on the news last night that all casuals can now go permanent if they ask‘. Given the sometimes complex and varied changes in our industrial relations systems in Australia, you can be forgiven for being on the backfoot with this question. However, …

Records – in particular, records relating to employment. *yawn* But….what if we told you this is often the one area that employers wish they’d paid attention to before they were hit with penalties by an industrial regulator? In our travels, we regularly see missed record keeping requirements that would fail an inspection by an industrial regulator. For example, not having the correct pay level recorded, no date of commencement of employment…or there being no record of the termination of employment! …

Over the years, we’ve helped many of the companies and the clients we’ve worked for realise a BIG mistake….hiring the wrong person. And it wasn’t necessarily during the shortlisting or face-to-face interviews where we made the connection to something fishy in candidate-town. How have we done this? We simply made sure that reference checks were carried out….and also that they were with the right people, addressed the ‘niggles’ found during interviews and were treated like an interview themselves! You want …